ad never taken the trouble to espouse her before the mayor, yet he
had loved her and had always treated her with great respect. She was a
woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is
white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for
her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all
and see all, crouching in their hapless gloom.

When my father died thus at Genoa my mother took a hatred for that
manner of living, and she broke off all ties with the athletes who had
been his comrades, and, taking the little money that was hers in a
little leather bag, she fled away with me to the old town of Orte, where
my grandmother still lived, the widow of the weaver. The troop wished to
keep me with them, for, although I was but five years old, I was supple
and light and very fearless, and never afraid of being thrown up in the
air, a living ball, in their games and sports.

Orte was just the same then as it is now. These very aged towns I think
never change: if you try to alter them you must break them up and
destroy them utterly. Orte has known the Etruscans: she can very well do
without modern folk. At Orte my mother and grandmother dwelt together in
one room that looked over the river--a large vaulted chamber with grated
casements, with thick stone walls--a chamber in what had once been a
palace. My mother was then still very young and beautiful--of a pale,
serious beauty, full of sadness. She smiled on me sometimes, but never
once did I hear her laugh. She had never laughed since that awful day
when, in the full sunlight, in the midst of the people, in the sight of
the sea, in Genoa, a man had dropped from air to earth like an eagle
fallen stone dead from the skies, struck by lightning.

My mother had many suitors. She was beautiful of face, as I say, like
one of the Madonnas of our old painters: she was industrious, and all
her little world knew very well that she would one day inherit the strip
of field and the red cow that my grandmother owned outside the gates of
Orte. All these pretty suitors of course made a great fuss with me,
caressed me often, and brought me tomatoes, green figs, crickets in wire
cages, fried fish and playthings. But my mother looked at none of them.
When a woman's eyes are always looking downward on a grave, how should
their tear-laden lids be lifted to see a fresh lover? She repulsed them
all, always. She lived, lonely and sad, as w